Ursula Le Guin’s dystopian novel The Dispossessed (1974) is set on a moon called Anarres, where an anarchist community established itself after breaking away from the capitalist mother-planet Urras. During a history lesson, children in Anarres are shown archival film footage of a beach on Urras, which speaks to the horrific visual iconography of contemporary Europe. The film’s voiceover provides a commentary upon the images in the film:

“Bodies of children dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches. On the beaches of Tius, seven hundred kilometres away … women kept for the sexual use of male members of the propertied class lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class”. A close-up of dinnertime; soft mouths champing and smiling, smooth hands reaching out for delicacies wetly mounded in silver bowls. Then a switch back to the blind blunt face of a dead child, mouth open, empty, black, dry. “Side by side,” the quiet voice … said. (Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 1974).

Reading the news this summer has involved negotiating similarly jarring images: people desperately paddling towards Mediterranean beaches on overloaded dinghies while tourists sunbathe amidst the flotsam of failed crossings, and the growing piles of discarded lifejackets. In contemporary Europe, previously segregated images of tourists and migrants are now captured within the same visual frame. ‘It is surreal’, Greek photojournalist Yannis Behrakis commented, witnessing the ‘migrants arriving on the beach each day among tourists and posh hotels’.

This year alone, we know that at least 500,000 people have made their way to Europe by perilous sea-crossings, and an estimated 3000 of these have drowned en route. Let’s be clear, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ is actually a crisis of international borders, neocolonialism, and imperialism. European border-control policies turn voyages to safety, freedom, and opportunity into treacherous and sometimes fatal journeys. As one British journalist notes “They were murdered. Actually, they were massacred. The policy stipulated they should be left to die. So they died”.

British news media perspectives on these Mediterranean beach scenes have swayed between apparently distinct poles of xenophobia and humanitarianism. For example, newspapers have featured many stories about family holidays ruined by ‘thousands of boat people from Syria and Afghanistan’ who have turned the Greek islands into ‘disgusting hell hole[s]’.

In this story, we are directed to read the figures of ‘Anne’ and ‘Tony’ as respectable, hard-working people, while ‘the boat people’ and ‘penniless migrants’ living in a ‘rubbish strewn’ camp are rendered as ‘human waste’. This kind of language classifies and devalues, drawing distinctions between those whose lives are of value and those who are dispensable.

These two genres of reporting (humanitarian/saviour and racist/xenophobia) often appear alongside each other in the same newspapers. Flipsides of the same coin they both represent and shape European perspectives on the current crisis at the borders, in which migrants are imagined as alien others, whether ‘deserving refugees’ or ‘illegal migrants’. In both registers the agency, knowledge, and collective capacities of people who have been dispossessed from their homes and livelihoods from European-backed wars and destructive economic policies.

In response to overt and implicit anti-migrant racism in coverage of the life and death struggles taking place at Europe’s borders, there have been calls for more care in how this unprecedented exodus of people is described and represented. This has led to what one BBC news headline describes as a ‘battle over the words used to describe migrants’. In August, the Director of News at Al Jazeera issued a directive to journalists to stop using the term ‘migrants’ to describe people crossing into Europe, because it has ‘evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances’. Indeed, the consequence of the stigmatisation of the term “migrant” has been palpable in European news reporting, as Barry Malone, the online editor at Al Jazeera notes:

The logic behind Al Jazeera’s decision is that the term ‘refugee’ has a specific international legal genealogy enshrined in the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. However, this rationale fails to recognise the fundamental erosion of both the legal status and popular meaning of the terms refugee and asylum-seeker in contemporary Europe, which has accompanied the tightening of legal migration channels. Since the 1990s European and other wealthy states have shirked their international obligations as signatories to the 1951 convention through creating new legal classifications that diminish refugee rights. For example, the small number of Syrian refugees which Britain has agreed to house will be granted ‘humanitarian protection status’ for five years, after which time they will either need to apply to remain longer, leave, or be forcibly deported. In other words, Britain is actually accepting no Syrian refugees at all. As we write, it is unclear whether Germany will accept Syrians as refugees, or, like the UK, will also offer only time-limited protection and leave-to-remain.

We should be wary of those who insist, in the words of British historian and journalist Tim Stanley, that ‘it is down to the state in which they have arrived to define what they are’. The ‘what’ in this sentence is chilling, a reminder of the ways in which the bureaucratic classification of people operates through what Alexander Wehelyie terms ‘racial assemblages’: the socio-political processes through which humanity is disciplined into ‘humans, non-quite-humans, and nonhumans’ (2014: 8).

The school children on Anarres are not shocked by the film they watch. It transpires that this is a tired lesson and they speculate amongst themselves about whether life on Urras is as ‘disgusting, immoral [and] excremental’ as their teachers would lead them believe. Yet, when the protagonist of The Dispossessed visits Urras as an adult, he discovers precisely the world of ‘commonplace horrors’ he was taught about as a child. So horrific is the inhumanity he witnesses, that he has no language, no words, with which to comprehend and describe it. The lesson here is that when the violence of inequality becomes ordinary, we can no longer comprehend it or imagine alternatives. For Europeans, photographs and television footage of migrant arrivals, of rescues at sea, of overloaded boats, discarded life-jackets, lost objects and dead children on Mediterranean beaches are rapidly becoming commonplace horrors.

The political response to build higher walls and fences, to build prisons and camps, and accelerate deportations will only exacerbate the vulnerabilities faced by 60 million displaced people, that is ‘1 in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum’ (UNHCR, June 2015). The movement of people is not the problem, the violence of global apartheid is the problem. Global apartheid more accurately describes the refugee crisis we are witnessing. Global apartheid, a language of apart-ness, relies on stigmatization and racialization to produce seemingly natural differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’. This language operates in tandem with practices of physical segregation, fortification and militarization of boundaries, detention and expulsion.

In conclusion then, we need to fight for refugee rights, but, taking a cue from the political allegories of Le Guin’s science fiction we also need to nurture more radical alternative perspectives on this crisis in order to see its strangeness and its horror. As Yanis Varoufakis put in on a recent television debate about the refugee crisis in Europe, ‘looked at from space…borders are an absurdity’ (BBC Question Time, 24 Sep 2015).